Want to Drive Traffic to Your Web Site? Get Listed on Google News!

Google is one of the Big Three search engines (Yahoo and MSN round out the list) and its news service is one of the most popular online news portals on the planet. Getting listed as part of Google’s news service is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Not only do you want to have your site listed on Google News, but you also want your content to be put in front of web surfers who have signed up for Google News Alerts.

Since users sign up to receive Google News Alerts based on specific keywords, your site can be seen by hundreds or even thousands of people who are interested in your niche market. So how do you get included on Google News feeds? It’s very simple: you ask.

Unlike web sites indexed by Google’s crawlers, the decision of whether to list a certain site on Google News is made by humans. If you want to make the cut, you need to include more than original content. Google’s staff members are also looking for multiple contributors, proper attribution and servers with the ability to load pages quickly.

Once your site has been included in Google News, you may be able to get a higher ranking by submitting your sitemap through Google’s webmaster tools. If you are using a content management system like Drupal, you may already have a module that will generate a sitemap for you automatically.

You will also want to ensure that your content management system can generate URLs that include relevant keywords. Numbers, question marks, or other characters that don’t tell the reader anything about your content should be avoided.